Set up the personal cloud service

One cool and practical project you can do on an Orange Pi or a Raspberry Pi is to set up a free, personal and “on-premise” version of Dropbox. This will allow you, among other things, to share files between your different devices. Additionally, you can automatically upload any new pictures from your phone to the cloud storage. In this tutorial you will learn to install the private cloud server software, configure it and sync files from a mobile device. I tested these steps on the Orange Pi and I assume this will also work on the Raspberry Pi. We will store the data on and external device, like a USB flash drive or external HDD, connected to the Orange Pi.

Connect the ultrasonic sensor to the Orange Pi

In this tutorial we will learn how to connect a HC-SR04 ultrasonic range sensor to the Orange Pi. This sensor measures distance from the sensor to an object by using ultrasounds. This is similar to how animal echolocation works, for example bats navigating in total darkness. Also, it’s how the submarine’s sonar detects objects under the sea.

Install Java on Orange Pi

Let’s put the yellow elephant on the Orange Pi! Hadoop is a framework for distributed data storage and processing used in big data applications. We will set up a single node Hadoop cluster on the Orange Pi. This may or may not be practical in a production environment, but it’s a good way to learn to configure Hadoop, load a file on the hdfs and run a MapReduce job.

Armbian on the microSD

You just got your own Orange Pi and you want to start developing your ideas. But before that, you need an operating system. In this post I will show how to install Armbian on the Orange Pi. Armbian is a Debian based operating system which targets the ARM architecture.

Looking for a new Raspberry Pi

So I decided to buy a new Raspberry Pi to use as a web server. I already have a Raspberry Pi 2, but I don’t want to use that as a server, because I am using it as a media center with OpenELEC and it works great. I initially wanted to get the Raspberry Pi 3.